Every time a player has a hero use a feat to "summon reinforcements" or "motivate the troops", the player rolls a D6. The resulting number is the number of times the opposing player(s) may kick the original player in the nuts for attempting such a shitty feat. (No critical failures, unless the kicker(s) screw up. Critical successes still apply.)

I think the officer would be better off as being similarsimilar to the 2005 ed one that makes squad forming free, but I would add some cp and give it a minor buff effect, for example one officer could give a +1 bonus to skill, damage, move, or armor, and you could pick an effect each time he joins or forms a new squad. (Not when reforming a squad though, and you would have to wait one turn after disbanding a squad to form one, otherwise people would choose move buff, move up to an enemy, reform and pick skill buff, attack, reform and pick damage buff, then reform and pick armor before the turn ended. LOL for OPness)

Squad forming is going to always be free in bw2010. The Officer skill bonus is only going to apply to Actions that the Officer takes part in, and like everyone else, Officers only get one Action per turn, so there's a hard limit on how often you can use his bonus.

How about a "General" unit (higher-ranked than a common Ociffer), that would grant broad-reaching army-wide bonuses, but also a severe penalty if killed or captured?

For example:

General (+3 CP):A unit with this ability is able to make his commands heard across the battlefield, and entire armies follow his lead. As a full-round action (taking up their Attack and Move for that turn), a General may impart one of the following bonuses to the whole army of their faction by instituting sweeping changes in doctrine and strategy:

Hold the Line: +1 to ArmorStrike Fast: +1 to MoveStrike Hard: +1 to DamageBest of the Best: +1 to Skill Rolls

A General may switch to granting a different bonus with another full-round action.

A General is subject to the same Crankiness rules as Heroes, so you can have multiple Generals on the battlefield, granting different bonuses, but having to compete with each other for asserting command and having the shiniest bling-of-war will drive them nuts.

If your General is killed or captured, the bonus they were granting turns into a penalty instead. So a +1 to Armor becomes a -1 to Armor if your General is forcibly removed from duty. So the more Generals you have, the more potential for the enemy to seriously gimp you.

Obviously, the bigger the armies on the field, the more this specialty will pay dividends with net boosts of stats.

Shamelessly blatant self-promotion: check out my armory, where you can find new custom abilities and battle-gear stats, and my MOCPages page, which I really ought to update more often.

I suppose you could modify "+1 to Skill Roll" to "up 1 Skill Die", but here's my reasoning for statting it out like I did:

6. It lets the regular ol' Officers still have something to do, regardless of if a General is present or not.

7. It's +1 to Skill Roll, not to Skill Rating. I know it's easy to miss the difference at first, but it's a significant one. So a fig's Skill Rating is still 1d6. It's just whatever it rolls on that d6 is gonna have 1 added to it, after the roll. A Critical Fail (roll of 1) is still a Crit Fail. But a Critical Success (Roll of 6, which entitles it to roll another d6 until it stops rolling 6s), gets a +1 to the result, as does any roll above a 1. This is similar to how Gunners can give other Gunners a +1 Bonus to Attack Rolls.

On a related note, increasing Skill Die size lessens your chances of critical success. A regular fig gets a crit-hit appx. one out of 6 rolls, while a Hero only gets one every 10 rolls.

Shamelessly blatant self-promotion: check out my armory, where you can find new custom abilities and battle-gear stats, and my MOCPages page, which I really ought to update more often.

Time and time again has shown from experience that adding static values to skill rolls severely fucks up the way things work. +1 means that a rifle or pistol shot will hit 5/6 times it is fired, which is flat out unfun.

the critical thing is indeed true. Any minifig always has the choice to "underskill" and use a smaller die for this reason.

IVhorseman wrote:Time and time again has shown from experience that adding static values to skill rolls severely fucks up the way things work. +1 means that a rifle or pistol shot will hit 5/6 times it is fired, which is flat out unfun.

Does it? What about Gunnery support? Big targets? Height advantage? Any number of other minor numerical adjustments?

IVhorseman wrote:the critical thing is indeed true. Any minifig always has the choice to "underskill" and use a smaller die for this reason.

They can? This is the first time I've heard of it.

Shamelessly blatant self-promotion: check out my armory, where you can find new custom abilities and battle-gear stats, and my MOCPages page, which I really ought to update more often.

Sorry, didn't know this. In my homebrew squad rules, which are crappy (and not on the forums so don't look for them!) you need an officer to form a squad. I think those squads might be broken though, so I'm going to redo them when I have time.

stubby wrote:The Officer skill bonus is only going to apply to Actions that the Officer takes part in, and like everyone else, Officers only get one Action per turn, so there's a hard limit on how often you can use his bonus.

Oh, that's a little disappointing. But thanks for the info nonetheless!